side projects

January 13th 2015

If you've tried to make a Google Hangouts app, you probably already know that it
sucks pretty badly. Famously terrible documentation, crazy bloated
JavaScript, and mandated UX requirements. You also might know that you
can craft a URL to open a new hangout without any of the bloat like so:

https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_

But what if you want to make a hangout with your app and set its app_type to
ROOM_APP so that your app is loaded for everyone by default?

February 17th 2013

Posit that humans are just the reproductive organs of ideas, and our minds
little more than churning pools of interchanging notions. In short, standard
meme theory. We might be hosts whose carefully formulated egos are nothing
more than the emergent terrain of an ancient memetic battleground - one imagines
long wars between the myriad incarnations of fear and laziness for control of
our weary brains. The memes with the most dominant survival characteristics must
have long since evolved - likely candidates being caution, hope, and solidarity.
In this paradigm, the most prolific ideas are the hardiest survivors of
thousands of years of crossbreeding, their properties now the building blocks of
more complicated and fragile abstractions like justice, ambition, and
melancholy. The simplest ideas might occupy the lowest and most important rungs
of an intellectual ecosystem, akin to our humble meat-space phytoplankton.

August 15th 2012

Disclosure: I recently worked for Google for about a year. It was alright.

Recently, Vic Gundotra of Google+ fame made a bold statement. He
proclaimed
that the lack of write API access to Google+ is born not out of lack of
foresight, planning, or even bandwidth, but out of trepidation, caution, and the
desire to do right by developers.